Short Story Sunday 28: “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” by Gene Wolfe

The ebook version of The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction is on sale for the month of February. A sale price of $2.99 for a book running a length of 224 thousand words and collecting more than 30 short stories, it’s a hard deal to pass up. Despite having read only two books and a handful of his stories, Gene Wolfe looms large in my pantheon of favourite writers. I find his work to be difficult and frustrating (probably the reason I haven’t read many of his works), but his mastery of prose sucks me in every time. It’s alluring and hypnotic in the way good fiction can be, but what makes it great is that the time I spend rereading large passages and sometimes entire chapters or stories is greatly rewarded. It’s challenging, but worthwhile.

As I’ve been doing with other anthologies, I’ll be writing about the stories I read here at SUR. It’ll undoubtedly make my progress through the book laboriously slow. However, I trust it will be a labour of love and like the strongest of loves will require a lot of work and dedication. Pick up your copy and join along. Wolfe writes the kind of fiction that generates discussion and interpretation, so do not be shy about leaving comments.

“The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” by Gene Wolfe
Read in The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Originally published in Orbit 7 (1970), edited by Damon Knight
 
A young boy, Tackman “Tackie” Babcock, lives with his mother in a large house by the sea. His days are spent in solitude, his mother spending a lot of time in bed and her boyfriend coming and going. He fills his day by reading a book called The Island of Doctor Death. Characters from the book start to appear in the real world. At the house, a costumed party is organized by his mother’s suitor and Tackie’s aunts. At the party, characters from his story, including Doctor Death, step out of the book. Doctor Death leads him to his mother’s bedroom where he witnesses her experiencing a drug overdose and the boy runs to a neighbour’s house and contacts the police.
 
 
Commentary:
The summary above barely begins to give you an idea of what’s going on in this story. Putting aside my shortcomings as a writer, it’s very difficult to talk about anything written by Wolfe without taking it apart. I’d even say that part of reading a Gene Wolfe story is to closely examine pieces of it that stand out or don’t seem to fit and trying to see if there are any other pieces within the narrative that match up. His works are often described as puzzles, but they’re puzzles presented to you partially solved, but with pieces intentionally misplaced or missing. It’s not a box of random pieces, it’s not unreadable. If anything, it’s captivatingly readable despite the jumbled and calculated method used to present it to the reader. The story exists on several layers and (surprising me every time) works on several layers.
 
After my first reading, the uppermost layer which could be characterized as the plot seemed a little slight to me. There’s enough going on, sure, but it’s not pact with plot. Anybody who has an interest in Wolfe has probably read about this story. It’s one of his signature stories and is often talked about as a classic. Knowing that, I think I was expecting more than what I got. Wolfe presents us with a young character that is living a particularly lonely life and has a strong emotional response to a campy paperback pastiche of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. It’s an argument for the wonders of escapism. Soon after starting his book, Tackie comes face-to-face with characters form the novel and has meaningful interactions with them, some of which will likely prove formative to his development from child to adult.
 
There’s plenty more going on, some of which I didn’t quite grasp. There are connections made between the people in Tackie’s life and the characters of the Doctor Death novel. As is often the case with Wolfe, things aren’t always as they seem and sometimes things (objects, people, places, etc.) exist in more ways than one. You could say that they inhabit many realities simultaneously. A couple quick examples include the island that his mother’s house is on. It is both an island and not an island (it’s truly a peninsula), the house is both yellow, but so faded by time that it’s also mostly grey. Tackie is a young boy and at one point in the story when facing Captain Ransom (the hero of the pulp novel) he is taller, stronger, and older. He’s another version of himself. There is a costumed party that takes place and it can be argued that one of the primary reasons for the gathering to be a costumed party is to give Wolfe an easy way to comment on the multiple dimensions that each character could be expressing for theme and plot. There’s a lot going on and there are plenty of nuggets for you to pick up and investigate. I have nothing significant to share here other than even when I can’t put my finger on it, there are many passages in “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” where it’s clear there is a deeper meaning to behold if you can figure it out.
 
Even though I’ve admitted that many things escaped me, a second allowed me make some sense of what was going on. Here are some observations I was able to make. Wolfe presents elements that seem like they might be autobiographical in nature. These elements, in classic Wolfe fashion, also have a universal applicability for the reader. Through the character of Tackie he presents experiences that feel unique to you and your youth spent in the company of books. Those same experiences have likely been shared by nearly every other young reader growing up (particularly those who enjoyed science fiction, action adventures, and fantasy). Because it feels so personal and convincing, it’s easy to think that Wolfe is pulling from his own youth, which he undoubtedly is, but I’m equally convinced that’s not all. One example is when Tackie is reading a passage that he’s enjoying so much that he forces himself to stop reading and go to sleep. The book is so good and so precious to him that he wants to extend the time he has reading it for the first time. This made me think of something Wolfe wrote in an essay about The Lord of the Rings:

You are not likely to believe me when I say that I still remember vividly, almost 50 years later, how strictly I disciplined myself with that book, forcing myself to read no more than a single chapter each evening. The catch, my out, the stratagem by which I escaped the bonds of my own law, was that I could read that chapter as many times as I wished; and that I could also return to the chapter I had read the night before, if I chose. There were evenings on which I reread the entire book up the point — The Council of Elrond, let us say — at which I had forced myself to stop.

Wolfe’s recollection of how he first read Tolkien’s novel closely mimics Tackie’s experience reading The Island of Doctor Death. In our current culture where binging television and books appears to be the norm or at least something that some among us brag about to our colleagues on Mondays, this seems odd. I think it fits. At the time when paperbacks were mostly sold on spinner racks and had their edge of their pages in various colours (yellow, red, indigo) there were simply less books, less TV. It’s easy to see how a person would discipline themselves to savour something truly wonderful. In my own childhood I lived in a small rural community and because of a bureaucratic stupidity I couldn’t get a municipal library card and had to limit myself to my father’s books and my school library. I get it. It resonates strongly with me and I’m sure it resonates with many other readers too.
 
I think another reason that the biography of a lonely book nerd works well is that Wolfe writes this story in the second person. It’s an odd choice which he uses to great effect. The lyrical nature of his prose draws you in, but the use of second person narration literally places you into the story. The reader is Tackie. He’s our fiction suit and Wolfe manages to pull it off really well. Everything that happens to Tackie is heightened. It feels real and powerful. It’s incredibly immersive.
 
 

Rating: 5 stars
Despite reading the story twice in quick succession, there are plenty of things that I don’t understand about “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories”. That doesn’t really diminish my enjoyment of it. There enough that are understand that I don’t feel cheated by its complexity. Wolfe’s prose is a joy in itself and the difficult to execute use of second person narration is a trick that any reader would applaud.
 
I love the story’s sense of immediacy and how convincingly Wolfe recreates the feeling of escapism found in fiction, even lowbrow and campy as it’s portrayed here, by young readers. It’s that element of truth that and how Wolfe ties it into his theme of fiction being a guide to maturing youths that make this story a success for me. I enjoy it even more because it’s not just arguing for escapism as something of value in itself, but also that lessons learned in a fictional setting can be used to help you understand and better navigate the real world. It’s unclear how old Tackie is, but he’s certainly young enough not to have any context for sex, drugs or an adult party spiralling out of control. The final few pages of the story see him increasingly surrounded by characters and events of his book, perhaps an attempt for him to make sense of the real world by connecting it to character and images form the fictional setting which he better understands.
 
Tackie doesn’t understand what is being injecting in his mother’s arm nor does he understand what the marks on his mother’s arm are. We, the reader, understand that they’re track marks from previous drug use whereas Tackie equates them to the experiments and injections performed by Doctor Death in his book. This is what I mean when I say Wolfe’s writing has layers. He pulls this off several times in this story along and it shows the command of language and his story that is simply masterful.  
 I want to share a passage at the end that I absolutely love. It’s a conversation between the fictional Doctor Death and Tackie:

They go away and you pick up the book and riffle the pages, but you do not read. At your elbow Dr. Death says, “What’s the matter, Tackie?” He smells of scorched cloth and there is a streak of blood across his forehead, but he smiles and lights one of his cigarettes.
You hold up the book. “I don’t want it to end. You’ll be killed at the end.”
“And you don’t want to lose me? That’s touching.”
“You will, won’t you? You’ll burn up in the fire and Captain Ransom will go away and leave Talar?”
Dr. Death smiles. “But if you start the book again we’ll all be back. Even Golo and the bull-man.”
“Honest?”
“Certainly.” He stands up and tousles your hair. “It’s the same with you, Tackie. You’re too young to realize it yet, but it’s the same with you.”

It reads as a hopeful conversation to me. My reading of it contains two elements. The first is that books do not change, but that doesn’t mean they are static. For starters, who you are informs what you are reading. There’s a reflective and participatory element to reading. In addition to this, in the novel The Island of Doctor Death, the doctor is both alive and dead, depending on where you are at in the book. If his end makes you sad or feel a significant sense of loss, you can always go back to the beginning and experience him alive again. The escapism offered by fiction is renewable. The second thing that jumps out to me is that while we may change, the books we return to can transport us not only to another time and place, but a different time in ourselves, perhaps even a different sense of being. There are books that are such a key part of my identify that reading them brings back feelings, images, places, people, the music of a particular band that I listened to while reading that book, etc. Good stories do not end, they live on as long as the pages are there to be read.